A World that has Forgotten How to LAUGH
A Tribute to Jonathan Winters
"Through humor, you can soften some of the worst blows that life delivers. And once you find laughter, no matter how painful your situation might be, you can survive it." - Bill Cosby
DH DeForge, VMD-A Commentary on the Great Man of Comedy
Jonathan Winters
07May2014
(CNN) -- Jonathan Winters, the wildly inventive actor and comedian who appeared in such films as "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" and "The Loved One" and played Robin Williams' son on the TV show "Mork & Mindy," has died. He was 87. [April 13, 2013]
Winters died Thursday evening of natural causes at his home in Montecito, California, according to business associate Joe Petro III.
Winters was known for his comic irreverence, switching characters the way other people flick on light switches. His routines were full of non sequiturs and surreal jokes. Williams, in particular, often credited him as a great influence.
"First he was my idol, then he was my mentor and amazing friend," tweeted Williams. "I'll miss him huge. He was my Comedy Buddha. Long live the Buddha."
"Genius" was a common touchstone as comedians reacted to Winters' death.
Winters, who was widely admired by comedians in general, was awarded the Mark Twain Prize -- which goes to outstanding humorists -- in 1999.
"R.I.P Jonathan Winters," tweeted comedian and filmmaker Albert Brooks. "Beyond funny, he invented a new category of comedic genius."
"Had a great run. Actual genius," tweeted Kevin Pollak.
"A genius and the greatest improvisational comedian of all time," tweeted Richard Lewis.
Though he never had a breakout starring role, over the years his appearances on TV shows made him a beloved figure in the entertainment world. He was a favorite guest on "The Tonight Show" -- particularly in the early '60s when Jack Paar hosted it -- and turned up on the game show "The Hollywood Squares," Dean Martin's celebrity roasts and countless variety shows.
He told the Archive of American Television about the creation of his character Maude Frickert, the sarcastic old lady, who came from a relative he had.
"I decided, having seen a lot of older people, that many of them are shelved -- put in retirement homes to rot," he said. "I decided to (be) a hip old lady" -- one who had a wicked sense of humor, the kind of person who was married 12 times and cracked a whip in a ward of cardiac patients.
Other characters included Elwood P. Suggins, B.B. Bindlestiff and Lance Loveguard.
He had a regular role on the final season of "Mork & Mindy," putting him together with Williams, who played the space visitor Mork from Ork. Winters played Mearth, Mork's son, who -- having hatched from a giant egg -- was the size of an adult but had the mind of a child. The attempted pairing of Williams and Winters was expected to create comic fireworks, but the show's already falling ratings didn't pick up, and "Mork & Mindy" was canceled in 1982.
Winters showed his range with the occasional dramatic role. In an episode of "The Twilight Zone," he played a shark-like pool player. In the 1994 film "The Shadow" -- with Alec Baldwin as the hero with the ability to cloud men's minds -- he played Baldwin's police chief uncle.
He was also a prolific recording artist, producing more than a dozen comedy records, including 1960's "The Wonderful World of Jonathan Winters."
Winters was born November 11, 1925, in Dayton, Ohio. He developed his talent for characters and voices from a young age. After serving in World War II, he married his wife, Eileen, in 1948 and hoped to become an artist. That career went nowhere, but his wife encouraged him to enter a talent contest. His win there earned him a position as a disc jockey on a local radio station, making up some of his interviewees. Eventually he left for New York, becoming a nightclub comic and earning spots on "The Tonight Show."
In 1961, Winters suffered a nervous breakdown. He spent eight months in a mental institution and was diagnosed as bipolar.
"It was one of the toughest times in my life," he told the Archive of American Television.
But when he got out -- on April Fools' Day, 1962 -- he almost immediately got a call from director Stanley Kramer, offering him a role in "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World." Kramer was one of the most highly regarded directors in Hollywood, known for "The Defiant Ones" and "Judgment at Nuremberg."
He was reluctant about taking the role until his wife pushed him. "You'd better take it, because you'll never work again if you don't take it," he recalled her saying. In the 1963 film, filled with comedy all-stars, Winters stood out as a truck driver who destroys a gas station.
He was, many agreed, one of a kind.
"The first time I saw Jonathan Winters perform, I thought I might as well quit the business," tweeted Dick Van Dyke after hearing of Winters' death. "Because, I could never be as brilliant."
His wife, Eileen, died in 2009. He is survived by two children and five grandchildren.
Comments on the passing of the Father of Improvisational Comedy: Jonathan Winters...by Robin Williams
My father’s laughter introduced me to the comedy of Jonathan Winters. My dad was a sweet man, but not an easy laugh. We were watching Jack Paar on “The Tonight Show” on our black-and-white television, and on came Jonathan in a pith helmet. “Who are you?” Paar asked.
“I’m a great white hunter,” Jonathan said in an effete voice. “I hunt mainly squirrels.”
“How do you do that?”
“I aim for their little nuts.”
My dad and I lost it. Seeing my father laugh like that made me think, “Who is this guy and what’s he on?”
A short time later, Jonathan was on Paar again. This time Jack handed him a stick, and what happened next was extraordinary. Jon did a four-minute freestyle riff in which that stick became a fishing rod, a spear, a giant beetle antenna, even Bing Crosby’s golf club complete with song. Each transformation was a cameo with characters and sound effects. He was performing comedic alchemy. The world was his laboratory. I was hooked.
Not only was Jonathan funny on TV, but his comedy albums are also auditory bliss. One of my favorite routines involved a mad scientist who sounded like Boris Karloff. But instead of creating a Frankenstein, he made thousands of little men that he unleashed on the world. His shocked assistant cried out, “What are they looking for?”
The professor replied, “Little women, you fool.”
He also created comic characters like Maude Frickert and the overgrown child Chester Honeyhugger. In one classic pre-P.C.-era routine, he had Maude being molested by a huge farmhand. She protested, “Stop, I’m church people.” After he had his way, he was off to do his chores, and she called out, “Don’t be long.”
Mort Sahl said Jonathan was seen as a great improviser, but to him he was just being himself. He was a rebel without a pause, whether he was portraying the WASP who couldn’t get a decent martini in Mombasa or the cowboy who couldn’t ride a horse and backed out of frame. Jonathan’s wife, Eileen, maybe had the best quote. She said that Jonathan went through his terrible 2’s but that they lasted 20 years.
In 1981, my sitcom “Mork & Mindy” was about to enter its fourth and final season. The show had run its course and we wanted to go out swinging. The producers suggested hiring Jonathan to play my son, who ages backward. That woke me out of a two-year slump. The cavalry was on the way.
Jonathan’s improvs on “Mork & Mindy” were legendary. People on the Paramount lot would pack the soundstage on the nights we filmed him. He once did a World War I parody in which he portrayed upper-class English generals, Cockney infantrymen, a Scottish sergeant no one could understand and a Zulu who was in the wrong war. The bit went on so long that all three cameras ran out of film. Sometimes I would join in, but I felt like a kazoo player sitting in with Coltrane.
On one of his first days on the show, a young man asked Jonathan how to get into show business. He said: “You know how movie studios have a front gate? You get a Camaro with a steel grill, drive it through the gate, and once you’re on the lot, you’re in showbiz.”
No audience was too small for Jonathan. I once saw him do a hissing cat for a lone beagle.
His comedy sometimes had an edge. Once, at a gun show, Jon was looking at antique pistols and a man asked if he was a gun proponent. He said: “No, I prefer grenades. They’re more effective.”
Earlier in his life, he had a breakdown and spent some time in a mental institution. He joked that the head doctor told him: “You can get out of here. All you need is 57 keys.” He also hinted that Eileen wanted him to stay there at least until Christmas because he made great ornaments.
Even in his later years, he exorcised his demons in public. His car had handicap plates. He once parked in a blue lane and a woman approached him and said, “You don’t look handicapped to me.”
Jonathan said, “Madam, can you see inside my mind?”
If you wanted a visual representation of Jonathan’s mind, you’d have to go to his house. It is awe-inspiring. There are his paintings (a combination of Miró and Navajo); baseball memorabilia; Civil War pistols and swords; model airplanes, trains, and tin trucks from the ’20s; miniature cowboys and Indians; and toys of all kinds.
We shared a love of painted military miniatures. He once sent me four tiny Napoleonic hookers in various states of undress with a note that read, “For zee troops!”
But the toys were a manifestation of a dark time in his life. Jonathan was a Marine who fought in the Pacific in World War II. When he came home from the war, he went to his old bedroom and discovered that his prized tin trucks were gone.
He asked his mother what she did with his stuff.
“I gave them to the mission,” she said.
“Why did you do that?”
“I didn’t think you were coming back,” she replied.
Jonathan has shuffled off this mortal coil. So here’s to Jonny Winters, the cherubic madman with a stick who touched so many. Damn, am I going to miss you!
Robin Williams is an Oscar-, Emmy- and Grammy-winning actor and comedian. He recently completed filming “The Angriest Man in Brooklyn” and is in production on “A Friggin’ Christmas Miracle"
A Commentary by Dr. Don DeForge and Tribute to Jonathan Winters
If I say to anyone today under 30 years of age....don't you miss the humor of Jonathan Winters, I will get a look as though they are asking....who is "freakin" Jonathan Winters.
The next generation of comedians is here...I do not question their greatness but unless you Google Jonathan Winters and watch him on late night television or alongside Robin Williams on the sit-com "Mork and Mindy" in the 80's you will never understand what brilliant humor is all about. He has been called genius....the father of comedy....and as Robin Williams writes with great love....the "cherubic madman"! Jonathan Winters wrote the book on improvisational comedy.
The picture above is one scene from Mork and Mindy when Jonathan Winters, hatches from an egg as Mork's son who ages backwards. Robin and Jonathan together brought scripts to pieces as they improvised what was never written.
People ask why is there violence, hate, killing, and people looking each day for ways to hurt others? Many times the hurt they cause is for personal economic gain. Other times the hurt is from mental imbalance or the lust of just causing pain in other's lives. Scholars, not I, have hypothesized that mental disease is a factor; the loss of family life; and the inability to laugh and love.
The answer is probably all of the above. There is not enough laughter and as Leo Buscaglia identified thirty years ago...there is just not enough hugging.
Leo Buscaglia on hugging: "I was raised in a large Italian family...on holidays everyone gets together and it takes 45 minutes to say hello and 45 minutes to say good-bye. Babies, parents, dogs--everybody's got to be loved! Because of that I have never suffered that existential feeling of not being loved. Try it sometime."
Young people today are not being loved and they turn into adults without love. They cannot hug because they were never hugged. They cannot laugh because in their family no one laughed. This causes pain, fear, and loneliness. I have stated many times before I am not writing my blogs as a psychiatrist but as a reporter on planet earth. A reporter who had parents who hugged; a family that laughed around a large dinner table at holidays; and a person blessed with parents that described the importance of respect, compassion, and concern for your neighbor.
As we pass a year since we said good-bye to Jonathan Winters, it is now a time to go back and watch him on the internet; which is my challenge for all age groups. Live with the laughter Jonathan creates; and share the smile, created by Jonathan, everyday with those who need our help.
Goodnight my friend and thank you for the happiness you continue to bring to this world.
Commentary by Dr. Don DeForge
17May2014
Comments address to DoctorDeForge@yahoo.com
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